Derrida, Foucault and the critics of modern social theory

1. Jacques Derrida: biography

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was born into a Sephardic Jewish family in El Biar, near Algiers, in French Algeria. In 1942 he was expelled from his school under the Vichy regime’s antisemitic laws, an experience of exclusion he later linked to his work. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he later taught, and from 1984 at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He held visiting posts at Johns Hopkins, Yale and the University of California, Irvine. His 1966 lecture at Johns Hopkins, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”, launched post-structuralism in the English-speaking world. He died in Paris in 2004.

Major works

• Of Grammatology (1967)
• Writing and Difference (1967)
• Speech and Phenomena (1967)
• Margins of Philosophy and Dissemination (1972)
• Specters of Marx (1993)
• “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’” (1989–90), on law and justice

2. Derrida’s contributions

Deconstruction

Deconstruction is a way of reading texts to show how they undermine their own claims. It is not destruction: it reveals the hidden assumptions, exclusions and contradictions on which a text depends.

• Logocentrism: Western philosophy assumes a fixed centre of meaning (the logos: truth, reason, God, presence) that guarantees language. Derrida argues no such centre exists outside language.
• Phonocentrism: the privileging of speech over writing, as if speech were closer to the speaker’s real meaning. Derrida reverses this: all language works like writing, through signs that refer to other signs.
• Binary oppositions: Western thought is organised in pairs (speech/writing, presence/absence, nature/culture, man/woman, reason/madness) in which the first term is privileged. Deconstruction shows the first depends on the second, reverses the hierarchy and then unsettles the opposition itself.
• Différance: a coined word combining to differ and to defer. Meaning arises from differences between signs (following Saussure) and is always deferred along a chain of signifiers; it is never fully present.
• “There is nothing outside the text” (il n’y a pas de hors-texte): there is no access to reality not mediated by language and interpretation.

Relevance to sociology and law

• Social categories (normal/deviant, citizen/alien, man/woman) are constructions with hierarchies built in; deconstruction exposes them. Postmodern feminists drew directly on this.
• In “Force of Law” he distinguished law, which is deconstructible, from justice, which is not: law always rests on an original act of force, and justice is the ideal by which it is criticised. Critical legal studies used this.
• Methodologically, social scientific texts themselves (including theories of society) can be read for what they exclude.

Criticism: obscure style; relativism; accused of making political commitment impossible (Habermas, Searle). Defenders point to his later ethical and political writings on justice, hospitality and democracy “to come”.

3. Michel Foucault: life and works

Michel Foucault (1926–1984), French philosopher and historian of ideas, held the chair of the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France from 1970.

• Madness and Civilization (Histoire de la folie, 1961)
• The Birth of the Clinic (1963)
• The Order of Things (1966)
• The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)
• Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975)
• The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1976)

4. Foucault’s contributions

1. Discourse: a body of statements, practices and rules that define what can be said and thought about a subject (madness, crime, sexuality) and who may speak with authority. Discourses produce the objects they describe: the “madman”, the “delinquent”.
2. Archaeology and genealogy: archaeology uncovers the rules (the episteme) underlying the knowledge of a period; genealogy, after Nietzsche, traces how present practices arose from contingent struggles, not from progress.
3. Power/knowledge: power and knowledge imply one another. Psychiatry, medicine, criminology and the social sciences are both forms of knowledge and techniques of power.
4. Power is productive and capillary: it is not only possessed by the State or a class and exercised downward; it circulates through all relations, and it produces subjects, not only repressing them.
5. Disciplinary power (Discipline and Punish): from public torture (the execution of Damiens, 1757) to the modern prison. Discipline works through hierarchical observation, normalising judgement and the examination, in prisons, schools, barracks, factories, hospitals.
6. The panopticon: Jeremy Bentham’s design of a prison where a central tower can see every cell, while inmates cannot see whether they are watched. They come to watch themselves. Foucault takes it as the model of modern surveillance society.
7. Biopower (History of Sexuality): modern power takes life itself as its object: births, health, sexuality, population. It works through discipline of individual bodies and regulation of populations (biopolitics).
8. Governmentality: the art of governing conduct, including self-government.
9. Resistance: “where there is power, there is resistance”.

Criticism: if power is everywhere, there is no standpoint from which to judge it (Habermas, Nancy Fraser); historical claims are selective; agency of subjects is underplayed.

5. Critics of modern social theories

The syllabus heading covers the postmodern critique of modernity and the replies to it.

The postmodern critique

• Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (1979): postmodernism is “incredulity toward metanarratives”, the grand stories of progress, emancipation and reason (Marxism, liberalism, science) that modern theory relied on. Knowledge breaks into local “language games”.
• Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981): in a media saturated society signs no longer refer to reality; we live in the hyperreal.
• Derrida and Foucault, above: no fixed meaning, and knowledge entangled with power.
• Feminist and postcolonial critics: modern theory’s “universal” subject was male, white and European.

Defenders of modernity

• Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project” (1980) and The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985): the Enlightenment project is incomplete, not exhausted; communicative rationality can still ground critique. Postmodernists are “young conservatives” who give up on reason.
• Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck: we live in late or reflexive modernity, not postmodernity.
• Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991): postmodern culture is itself a product of a new stage of capitalism, best explained by Marxist theory.

How this is examined

The Derrida essay (October 2023) asks for biography, works and contributions in that order: use sections 1 and 2 as they stand. The six-mark “Contributions of Derrida” (August 2024) needs deconstruction, logocentrism, binaries and différance. “Explain the contributions of Foucault” (April 2022): works, then the nine points, with the panopticon described in full. A question on critics of modern social theory would use section 5.